Not that I was trying to act like I knew everything, but I could at least guess and empathize to some extent with what it must have been. Thinking of how he had treated Shushu all this time while carrying the weight of a guilt that was anything but light as part of himself, I dropped my gaze and spoke carefully.
"I'm sorry...."
"......."
My voice was very small, but he didn’t miss it. I felt his eyes on my face, but I couldn’t meet them; instead I answered the question his gaze was handing me.
"About Artist Shushu... I was stupidly jealous...."
He let out a faint laugh—the kind that said he’d never imagined I would react like that. When I lifted my eyes from around his knees, his face with its slight smile and warm tone was looking at me. He wasn’t the man who had seemed buried in the past while talking to himself for a long time; he had come back to the present, to this moment, and was looking at me.
"Choi Inwoo transferred into Minton during the middle-school division right after his manifestation, and we’ve been friends since then... but with Shushu, we were together from kindergarten."
HMIS, where the children of Asia’s wealthy gathered, didn’t officially call itself an educational facility exclusively for alphas and omegas, but to transfer in from the middle-school division onward you had to have proof that you had manifested as an alpha or omega, and to enroll in the kindergarten or elementary divisions at least one parent had to be an alpha or omega. It wasn’t an official line item either, but the implicit condition clearly existed.
There were the occasional beta students mixed into the middle and high school divisions, but only if their family’s influence was exceptionally outstanding, and in most cases, if they failed to manifest they transferred out under unspoken pressure. No, within HMIS that was practically a tradition—an accepted, natural procedure. Because of that, he explained, it was fair to say that anyone who completed even the high-school curriculum there could be regarded as an alpha or omega of the very top tier of the vested class.
"To someone like me, who was so indifferent to others that people called me cold and who was an only child, he’s practically a brother I grew up with. But... no one, under any circumstances, ever takes precedence over your feelings."
He nailed it down in a voice full of certainty. On that point, I already trusted him enough because of the way he had acted all this time.
"I... don’t worry about that."
He smiled once more at my mutter and then simply looked at me for a long time. We had both had a tiring day and hadn’t even eaten dinner, but I didn’t feel hungry. Outside the window it had grown completely dark before we knew it.
"Everyone keeps an objective distance and a cool eye about other people’s affairs, comes to a plausible conclusion, and gives crisp advice... but when it’s their own affair... they hesitate even after the conclusion is obvious. The reason is simple. No matter how perfect a conclusion looks, there are always holes, and that tiny chance of failure you could casually erase in someone else’s life comes at you as an unacceptable fear in your own. The fear of even a one-percent chance of failure clamps a person’s mouth shut, ties their feet... and even as they know time will only make the problem worse, it turns them into a foolish person who can’t decide."
I knew better than anyone what he meant. I was the one who, out of exactly that fear, had let my father’s silence stand and turned away from the problem.
Afraid of being rejected again, I hadn’t taken any action to pull my father out of his silence. I knew that if I didn’t try anything, nothing in the relationship would change, and yet... even so, I chose to stand by and watch.
As if he were chewing on his own words, he gazed at me again in silence for a long time. I couldn’t look away from the light in his eyes, paler blue than usual. The moment I turned away, it felt like I would collapse. It was the face of someone holding on with difficulty, and I understood how hard it was for him.
"I once cornered Shushu, saying he’d let his judgment get muddy, swept up in something as fickle as love, which could disappear at any time, but now...."
He didn’t finish the sentence. He turned his head as if to flee and took a drink. Then he looked back at me, took a long breath, and spoke.
"I think every day about what would become of me if I lost you."
"......."
"That thought grabs me by the throat several times a day. Not only when you’re not by my side; even when we’re together like this... even at the peak when I’m inside you with knotting and completely drenched in the pleasure you give me—honestly, even then, I’m afraid."
It was such an unexpected confession that I felt a jolt, light shock. It sounded like a confession of how deeply he loved me, but I didn’t want the most overwhelming feeling he experienced through me to be fear.
"Seo Ihyeon."
His voice was calm and steady, without any tremor, but strangely there was something in it that made me feel a vague dread about what would come next. Like a misaligned door rattling in a strong wind, my chest felt unsettled.
"......."
"...Should we get married."
But what came out of his lips with that composed face wasn’t a threat.
If it were an impulse, there would have been some faint lift to it, but his voice, his eyes, and his expression as he looked at me were undisturbed and quiet, like he was voicing something he had prepared for a long time.
It felt like all the many things he wanted to say and had to say were filling his chest, and with that one line he was trying to stand in for them all... there was even a sense of humble care.
Separate from how earnest he was, it was such a sudden thing that I looked at him with a dazed smile.
He leaned forward, loosely holding the rocks glass in both hands.
"Whether it’s the UK, France, Germany, the US, anywhere... in any country where marriage between an alpha man and a beta man is legal, we can do it. It isn’t hard for me to get permanent residency or citizenship in any of them. If we do that, all the rights I hold will be legally guaranteed to you too... and if something should happen to me, I can turn all those rights safely over to you."
As if the possibility that something might happen to him were right in front of us, my expression stiffened a little; seeing the rigidity with his own eyes, he closed his mouth for a moment and looked away, as if he had misspoken.
"I’m not trying to chain you to me under the pretext of some paltry material perks...."
No—maybe not entirely not, either. He muttered in self-mockery and ran a broad hand along his jaw. Then he tangled his fingers through his hair, which had dried as-is after a shower with nothing put in it, and mussed it.
"To bring up marriage to you when you’re only twenty-two... it’s insane, isn’t it."
Because I showed so little reaction, he seemed to decide I was taking this proposal negatively—or that I wasn’t taking it seriously. He set the glass down, raked his face roughly with his palm, then took out a cigarette and lit it.
I thought I could see now that the composure with which he had raised marriage wasn’t calm at all, but a blankness born of tension and anxiety, a stiffness that had frozen solid.
He bent forward, propping his elbows on his thighs, and for a while he did nothing but bring the cigarette to his lips again and again. Watching his bowed head, which looked despondent at my response, I twisted the beer bottle in my hand.
Even though I believe I’m running toward him with all my heart, his love is always a few steps ahead of mine. I don’t mean it’s too hard to catch up. Only... if he has to stop and wait for me, who am slow, over and over, then at some point won’t he get tired—an indistinct fear rose.
I worried my lower lip, looked down at his face, and slowly opened my mouth.
"If you could say this... not like words pushed out as if something were chasing you... but after you’ve fully considered your future and your life plan... then I’ll answer you with all my heart, too."
He straightened and spoke in a dry voice while watching me.
"It’s true the words were impulsive, but that doesn’t mean there’s no weight in them."
"......."
"And it definitely wasn’t something I said lightly or just on a feeling."
Watching him grind out a cigarette only half-smoked in the ashtray, this time I felt a little anxious.
It wasn’t that I was pretending not to see his sincerity. How could I not know that when a man like him uses the word marriage, there can’t be any trace of flippancy mixed in.
It makes me happy that he wants me so much he feels impatient... but I didn’t want marriage as the method chosen to soothe that.
Now the beer bottle in my hands was beaded with water. I gripped it tight with both hands.
"This is my first time having a relationship like this with anyone... so maybe in some way I made you feel insecure. But... my feelings are anything but light."
Looking back, he had always asked me for deeper affection—sometimes like a joke, sometimes with serious eyes. But he had never once forced it on me, so I had taken it as nothing more than one of those small emotions that make up a romance, like my jealousy about Shushu.
Unlike him, I don’t have much... but even if feebly, the feelings in me that had started to grow again, and even the past I’d buried and turned away from—I thought I was laying all of it bare to him.
Am I still, without realizing it, clutching something inside me and not giving it to him? Is that why he feels afraid?
I know in my head that the balance of love between two people has nothing to do with their objective conditions... and yet sometimes I can’t believe it when someone like him—who seems like he’d have no reason to be insecure with anyone—shows his restlessness with me. Compared to him, I’m a kid who knows nothing, and like this... I’m completely gone on him....
"However it may sound to you, I... got this far because of you."
"......."
"With Morae and my brother, and picking up painting again... even being able to tell someone about my father... all of it was possible because of you."
If I’m the only one who can erase his fear, then I had to find the courage to break my silence. I drew in a deep breath and, as if swallowing it down in portions, continued speaking. The damp on the beer bottle in my hand felt like sweat seeping from me.
"Even if I told myself you were speaking impulsively... when I heard the word marriage, setting everything else aside, I was happy first—enough that... I want Awi, and... I love you."
"......."
He looked like someone who had heard not a confession of love but a declaration of a breakup.
He looked like a man standing under a sky collapsing on him.
His lips parted in a sigh, and his knitted eyelids trembled fine, like someone who had just been stung by harsh words and felt the sting.
I drew a long breath I had been holding back, set the beer bottle on the table, and rubbed my wet hands on my pants. My lips pressed together of their own accord.
Was it too unripe a confession. After only a few months together, was the word love from a twenty-two-year-old too light to inspire trust.
But even if we hadn’t said it out loud, I was certain the feelings melted into the give-and-take of our connection had, before we knew it, naturally evolved into love.
What I felt for him had a shape too complex to fit entirely inside like. What I saw through him wasn’t only pink heart-thudding or flutter. If the definition of love is ultimately different for each person and each pair, then no matter how carefully I chose, the word closest to what I feel looking at him now was love.
"......."
"......."
Like someone trying to shake off deep sleep, he blinked and gave a few small shakes of his head. Then he scrubbed his face roughly with both hands. When he looked at me again, the whites of his eyes were streaked red.
He stared at me for a long time with the face of someone feeling the sting after being hit by something sharp, then rose from his chair and moved into the seat beside me. Hm... the breath seeping from his closed mouth was heavy.
He cupped my cheek to turn me toward him and smoothed my hair back behind my ear with long, neat fingers.
"Even after finding out I’ve never had a serious partner—not once—and that I’ve been a shallow man... does Seo Ihyeon still love me."
He forced a joke out of a throat that was tight shut, and I smiled without sound. He rubbed my ear rim with his thumb and smiled back. When he smiled at me, he was so warm. In those moments he looked happy, like someone fully enjoying what he wanted, and I thought I was getting my heart across to him well.
I bent my head and rubbed my cheek along his jawline, resting my forehead on his shoulder.
"If you knew my real greed, held barely in check under this sliver of reason... you’d be very surprised."
Not disappointed by the lightness of his past casual relationships, but relieved and glad that before me he had never given anyone a serious heart—that’s who I was.
He framed my face again and turned it toward him. His face looking at me overflowed with feeling, but the current didn’t point in a single, clear direction. Maybe my expression when I heard the word marriage had been similar—a complexity that couldn’t be summed in a single word.
With his hands on my cheeks, his gaze traced my face; the distance closed carefully. His lips were drier than usual. After the light press that made the surface give a little, he pulled back, brushed his nose against mine, lowered his eyes, and spoke in a low voice.
"From where I’m standing—the man who can’t suppress it, and isn’t suppressing it—it might not be so surprising."
The hand stroking my cheek slid back to cradle my head # Nоvеlight # and went down to grip the nape of my neck. Forehead to forehead, he whispered again.
"Love me in a way that shocks me more."
"......."
"It doesn’t have to be the proper, healthy method. I want you to the point that I’m truly shocked... at least when it comes to me, forget self-control and dignity. I want you to be greedy for me enough that people would point at you and call you a bad man."
"......."
"Nothing else will do. I don’t think anything else will do."
It sounded like he was saying that he himself already loved me that way—beyond the proper bounds.
I carefully stroked his arms where they were wrapped broad around my neck. He pressed his lips to my eyelids and the bridge of my nose. Then he drew my neck closer, pushed our faces tight together, and laid a long kiss on my temple and my ear.
